From: "E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 14:25:15 +0800
To: WlkngOwl@unix.asb.com
Subject: Re: Another bad idea
Message-ID: <01I6ZU6HCZ5Y984TP7@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


From:	IN%"WlkngOwl@unix.asb.com"  "Deranged Mutant" 10-JUL-1996 05:02:42.84

>Great idea. Get some (possibly) innocent techie in an oppressive 
>country thrown in jail or executed.

	If these countries didn't value their technical people and what they
can do, they wouldn't be allowing them on the Internet (even in a restricted
way) in the first place. The above would only be a likely scenario if the
effort wasn't big enough - didn't cover enough people. China almost collapsed
(pity it didn't) with the Cultural Revolution; I doubt many in government there
who remember that time want to go through it again, particularly considering
the current level of instability there.

>Or perhaps s/he gets offended, 
>contributing to the notion that all Westerners are evil perverts 
>out to corrupt them.

	This is a possible problem with the pornography approach, yes; some
form of human rights information may be more suitable, even in countries in
which one of the main crackdowns on the Internet is anti-sex.

>> 	An extension of this for web sites, which I understand as possible
>> but difficult, would be to swap anyone from such a country trying to get
>> acces to a technical web site to instead receive "subversive" information or
>> pictures. (The pornography mentioned above would probably be more effective
>> in picture format; other pictures might include information on human rights
>> abuses).

>Damn aggrevating for that user, and it could get him/her in trouble.

	Yes. One possible solution for the aggrevation problem would be to
include material on human rights, cryptography, etcetera _and_ the tech info
that the person was looking for. While this would still give these countries
easy access to the technical info (a bad outcome), it would also lead to the
people getting information that the country's government didn't want.

>On a wide-scale it could provoke responses from those countries.  
>Imagine this list being bombarded with propaganda, or perhaps 
>somebody here looking at an anti-censorship web page getting 
>pro-censorship messages from religious fundamentalists.

	If you look at someone's web page and A. they haven't made a contract
with you to do otherwise and B. you haven't been smart enough to go through an
anonymizing web server or an anonymous account, you need to realize that they
are likely to keep info on you. I customarily don't use my own account for
web viewing for that reason.
	Bombardment of lists like these with propaganda, etcetera, is an
admitted possible problem. We're currently seeing something of the sort on
alt.religion.scientology, but (according to what I've gathered) they seem to be
dealing with that pretty well. I have my doubts how effectively the Chinese,
etcetera governments are likely to be in carrying out such attacks; they aren't
noticeably good at Internet-awareness.

>Or it could encourage them to use special firewalls which filter 
>content and disallow graphics... (probably many US-based companies 
>would be all-too-happy to sell them the software to do it), or even 
>close themselves off from the Internet altogether, perhaps form 
>separate, unconnected Family/Islamic/Chinese-values networks.

	How, precisely, is one going to filter out graphics from web sites in
Chinese? Ascii text and ideographs don't exactly get along. One interesting
option would be text, possibly varied to disable practical OCR, in the form of
graphics. This is more of a problem for web sites in English, although simple
denial of such to such countries has its advantages (as per some earlier
discussions).
	In the latter case, they aren't going to get the technical information
that's their reason for getting on the Internet in the first place. These
countries are largely third-world in locally understood technology, anyway;
the exception is for those who have gotten training in the West - note that
one of the biggest trade _surpluses_ of the US is in graduate education in
technical fields.
	-Allen